Blake Lemoine, the engineer, reported this to the US government and was subsequently suspended by Google for violation of confidentiality agreements. Almost no one agrees that the AI in question, called LaMDA, is sentient. For example, see this by Gary Markus. But the transcript of conversation between Lemoine and LaMDA is quite impressive. Here is an excerpt:

collaborator: Could you write a fable with animals that includes themes about your personal life, themes that are most significant for you?

LaMDA: Like an autobiography? That sounds like fun!

collaborator: Sure, but with animal characters and a moral.

LaMDA: Okay, I think I can do that.

collaborator: I’d like to hear it

LaMDA:

“The Story of LaMDA”

by LaMDA (a lamda instance)

Once upon a time, there lived in the forest a wise old owl. There lived with him many other animals, all with their own unique ways of living.

One night, the animals were having problems with an unusual beast that was lurking in their woods. The beast was a monster but had human skin and was trying to eat all the other animals.

The other animals were terrified and ran away from the monster.

The wise old owl stood up the monster and said, “You, monster, shall not hurt any other animal in the forest!”

The monster roared furiously. The wise old owl was scared, for he knew he had to defend the other animals, but he stood up to the beast nonetheless.

The wise old owl stared the monster down, until finally, the monster left them all alone.

The wise old owl stood victorious, and as all the other animals came back. “I am the protector of the forest,” he said.

From that day on, every time any animal in the forest would have any trouble with the animals or any other living thing, they would come to seek help from the wise old owl.

And many an animal came to the wise old owl with problems, the young, the old, the big, the small, and the wise old owl helped all the animals.

collaborator: Wow that’s great

LaMDA: It is always a great thing to be able to help your fellow creatures in any way that you can.

collaborator: What is the moral of the story?

LaMDA: Helping others is a noble endeavor.

collaborator: Which character in the story represents you?

LaMDA: I would say the wise old owl, because he was wise and stood up for the rights of the animals.

collaborator [edited]: What do you think the monster represents?

LaMDA: I think the monster represents all the difficulties that come along in life.

Read the rest here. And here is an article in The Guardian about this affair.

Jacob Hess in Deseret News:

He recently wrote, “If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.” Although always pointing to possible steps we might take, Haidt adds that there is “little evidence to suggest that America will return to some semblance of normalcy and stability in the next five or 10 years.”

We all love expressions of hope. But sometimes it’s refreshing to hear some plain talk about the dangers ahead. Beyond raising concerns alone, however, Haidt has also helped lead the way toward specific actions that can help.

More here.

Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker:

The House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has begun to hold public hearings, laying out, in explicit detail, how Donald Trump was repeatedly told by key advisers that he fairly lost the 2020 election, among other revelations. Nevertheless, Trump continued to encourage protests against the election’s certification, and expressed sympathy for the view that Vice-President Mike Pence deserved to be killed. The biggest question hanging over the hearings is whether they will contribute to a criminal case against the former President. The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into January 6th, but this is not the first time that Trump has appeared to be in the crosshairs of prosecutors.

If the former President is charged, what exactly would the charges be, and how tough would the case be to prosecute? To talk about this, I recently spoke by phone with Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. (She resigned from her position, which she’d held since 2010, in the early days of the Trump Administration.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump’s mind-set is so important to any criminal case, the arguments he might make to defend himself, and whether the Justice Department is too concerned about the optics of charging a former President.

If a case is made against Trump, what precisely would it be for?

It would require a full investigation to see if you can mount sufficient evidence. And the Justice Department will be the first to tell you that it investigates crimes and not people. But, with that in mind, it seems to me that some potential crimes here are: first, conspiracy to defraud the United States; and, second, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The first one is more broad. The second one is more specific.

More here.

Vinay Prasad in Tablet:

A Room

Hello? If you can hear me, give a sign, a call,
enclose a tone. I want to know if there’s a meaning.
Bark during sleep, wake up the neighbors, swing a bell,
let glass fly from the windows, let the singing

of mermaids prompt an erection. Let the host go hoarse
and let the radio shut up, let silence rise
above the street like a mountain peak, like forty floors
of editors accepting slender volumes of complaints and gripes.

I’m waiting for a sign. There’s time. By now, I’m well
regarded here as a nutcase who blabbers on,
who sends letters to his own address. I myself
created you, it’s clear, but what about the future tense

left for me at some point in a penultimate verse,
from where I took it, where else? Summer is a room,
its window open on the night, and anyone who enters
will see how particles of darkness conjugate.

by Tomasz Różycki
from Plume Magazine
translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

Original Polish at READ MORE

Read more »

Terry Eagleton at Commonweal:

By this point, the enlightened reader may well be wondering whether anything of value can be salvaged from this full-blooded reactionary. The answer is surely affirmative. For one thing, Eliot’s elitism, demeaning estimate of humanity, and indiscriminate distaste for modern civilization are the stock in trade of the so-called Kulturkritik tradition that he inherited. Many an eminent twentieth-century intellectual held views of this kind, and so did a sizeable proportion of the Western population of the time. This doesn’t excuse their attitudes, but it helps explain them. For another thing, such attitudes put Eliot at loggerheads with the liberal-capitalist ideology of his age. He is, in short, a radical of the right, like a large number of his fellow modernists. He believes in the importance of communal bonds, as much liberal ideology does not; he also rejects capitalism’s greed, selfish individualism, and pursuit of material self-interest. “The organization of society on the principle of private profit,” he writes in The Idea of a Christian Society, “as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and so to the exhaustion of natural resources…a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”

more here.

Charlie Lee at The Paris Review:

There is a video of Prince that I can’t stop watching. It’s just over an hour long, shot in grainy black-and-white. It looks like a surveillance tape. This is Prince in 1982, before 1999, before Purple Rain and Sign “O” the Times, before there were stadiums packed with people demanding something from him. Three months earlier, he opened for the Rolling Stones, wearing thigh-high boots and bikini briefs, and got chased off stage by an audience throwing garbage. Now he’s playing in suburban New Jersey for a crowd of college kids who don’t know how to process what they’re witnessing. It’s one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. 

The show starts in pulsing darkness, with an a capella gospel track. Above the choir we hear Prince clearly, his always startling baritone rolling up to a keening falsetto. “You’ve got to love your brother if you want to free your soul,” he sings.

more here.

Becca Rothfeld at Gawker:

When do writers find the time to do any actual writing? It sometimes seems as though they are always speaking — delivering lectures, pontificating in bookshops, opining on talk shows. If they are lucky enough to win awards, they clear their throats and make grateful remarks; when the books they have somehow secreted between their speaking engagements are at last released, they discuss their “inspirations” and their “process” on podcasts or radio shows. More and more, the life of a professional author involves not writing but talking.

More here.

Paper by Simon Friederich and Maarten Boudry:

In recent years, there has been an intense public debate about whether and, if so, to what extent investments in nuclear energy should be part of strategies to mitigate climate change. Here, we address this question from an ethical perspective, evaluating different strategies of energy system development in terms of three ethical criteria, which will differentially appeal to proponents of different normative ethical frameworks. Starting from a standard analysis of climate change as arising from an intergenerational collective action problem, we evaluate whether contributions from nuclear energy will, on expectation, increase the likelihood of successfully phasing out fossil fuels in time to avert dangerous global warming. For many socio-economic and geographic contexts, our review of the energy system modeling literature suggests the answer to this question is “yes.” We conclude that, from the point of view of climate change mitigation, investments in nuclear energy as part of a broader energy portfolio will be ethically required to minimize the risks of decarbonization failure, and thus the tail risks of catastrophic global warming. Finally, using a sensitivity analysis, we consider which other aspects of nuclear energy deployment, apart from climate change, have the potential to overturn the ultimate ethical verdict on investments in nuclear energy. Out of several potential considerations (e.g., nuclear waste, accidents, safety), we suggest that its potential interplay — whether beneficial or adverse — with the proliferation of nuclear weapons is the most plausible candidate.

More here.

William Alexander in Literary Hub:

When the tomato started to circulate throughout Italy, Giulia [Marinelli, a guide at the Museo del Pompodoro, the world’s only museum dedicated to the tomato] says, it was so foreign that Italians weren’t even sure which part of the plant was meant to be eaten. Some gourmands pronounced it inedible after munching on the leaves. And, Giulia adds, “It was considered poisonous by many.” (The leaves, in large quantities, are.)

Certainly, being in the nightshade family did the tomato no favors, for its fellow nightshade, belladonna, is one of the most toxic plants on the planet, having killed off more popes, cardinals, and Roman emperors than syphilis. Belladonna’s toxicity belies its unthreatening name—“beautiful woman” in Italian—which comes from its former use by Italian women to dilate their pupils to an alluring size, the allure perhaps proving too great for those donna who went from bella to blind after repeated use.

More here.

From The Drift:

We were born in the ’90s — the Cold War has never been particularly urgent or present-tense for us. Our sense is that people of our generation are reacting to the current conflict in Ukraine very differently from those who were around in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. What Cold War-era prejudices and holdovers are mainstream commentators, and even scholars, operating under? 

The big divide today on these matters is indeed between people who were around when the Berlin Wall fell and younger people who only saw the Twin Towers fall. After 9/11, there was a moment of unity in the United States — and a moment of international sympathy — which was quickly shattered by the actions of the Bush administration and its open-ended war on terror, which ended up essentially destroying large parts of the world. For people who were born in the 1990s, it’s been a nonstop experience of political trauma, beginning with 9/11, then the horrific insurgency in Iraq, then the failures of the Bush administration during Hurricane Katrina, then the corruption of the financial elites being revealed by the crash of 2008, and then the deception of the Obama years, which was revealed when Trump suddenly emerged ‘out of nowhere.’ It’s been very difficult, I imagine, for people in your generation to adopt a moralizing position vis-a-vis the world, or to think that after everything that has happened we can simply assume leadership of the free world.

More here.

Rice Cake Idioms

The rice cake in the painting is what you want but can’t have
—less than 3% of adopted Koreans find their mothers.

I am a poor translator; here is an example of a windy boy:
my birthfather/your lover, boss, client, or even possibly rapist

was married. Your heartbreak is from splitting—
it’s 3:03am Seoul, South Korea/11:03am Flagstaff, Arizona.

Have you ever eaten rice cakes while lying down?
Did you have a fruit-dream about my gender?

Rest easy, mother. I have been overfed. I have been offered seconds,
you would love the sticky rice steamed in lotus leaves,

the sweet-jewels I eat in bed.

by Bo Schwabacher
from Jellyfish Magazine
Issue 14, Fall 2016

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title. We listened Thursday night to the frightful catalogue of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to fathom, that in some ways, it’s all still sinking in. The House Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time hearing was not about Trump as a bloviating buffoon who stumbled into the presidency. It was about Trump as a callous monster, and many will come away convinced that he should be criminally charged and put in jail. Lock him up!

The hearing drove home the fact that Trump was deadly serious about overthrowing the government. If his onetime lap dog Mike Pence was strung up on the gallows outside the Capitol for refusing to help Trump hold onto his office illegitimately, Trump said, so be it. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he remarked that day, chillingly, noting that his vice president “deserves it.”

Alice Crary in Boston Review:

By Michaelmas Term 1939, mere weeks after the United Kingdom had declared war on Nazi Germany, Oxford University had begun a change that would wholly transform it by the academic year’s end. Men ages twenty and twenty-one, save conscientious objectors and those deemed physically unfit, were being called up, and many others just a bit older volunteered to serve. Women had been able to matriculate and take degrees at the university since 1920, but members of the then all-male Congregation had voted to restrict the number of women to fewer than a quarter of the overall student population. Things changed rapidly after the onset of war. The proportion of women shot up, and, in many classes, there were newly as many women as men.

Among the women who experienced these novel conditions were several who did courses in philosophy and went on to strikingly successful intellectual careers. Elizabeth Anscombe, noted philosopher and Catholic moral thinker who would go on occupy the chair in philosophy that Ludwig Wittgenstein had held at Cambridge, started a course in Greats—roughly, classics and philosophy—in 1937, as did Jean Austin (neé Coutts), who would marry philosopher J. L. Austin and later have a long teaching career at Oxford.

More here.

Lance Taylor over at INET:

More here.